Juggernaut

by Amelia C. Gormley

  Joining Nico, he worked on loading it into the truck. They labored largely in silence, but it was easy, companionable. Nothing like the quiet of the last several months Zach had spent in the company of his father and brother. And if Nico felt any discomfort or resentment from that morning, he gave no sign of it. They dug conservatively into their rations, finishing off the foil-wrapped chevron they’d cooked two nights prior, along with some of the dehydrated fruit Nico carried.

  “Ready to go?” Nico asked when they were done. Looking out the window, Zach saw the day was already aging; they’d be racing the sun to make progress and still find someplace secure to stop for the night.

  He took one last look around his childhood home and nodded grimly. There was nothing left of the life he’d lived here.

  “Let’s go.”

  Much to Nico’s frustration, it took them hours to find their way around the Indianapolis metropolitan area. They were trying to stay outside the city limits, but the truck’s navigational system—no doubt detecting a complete absence of traffic from the satellites and thus no reason to avoid the main thoroughfares—kept trying to reroute them onto the shortest-distance course through the city. Finally, they stopped so that Zach could find the computer’s auto-routing program and disable it, hopefully without turning the truck into a lawn ornament.

  “Next time we come across a reasonably small town, someplace with a really low population, I want to stop at a pharmacy,” Nico announced once they’d managed to skirt Indianapolis.

  Zach nodded, accepting it without question. First aid supplies were the one thing they weren’t very well equipped with, after all, even if it wasn’t Nico’s primary concern just now. They stopped along a deserted stretch of road to eat lunch and swap drivers, and Nico watched Zach assess each passing town to find the smallest one that would still boast a pharmacy.

  “Thanks,” Nico muttered when Zach pulled into the parking lot. So far, so good. The place looked completely deserted. Nonetheless, he grabbed the assault rifle and reached in back for the shotgun. “Mind getting up on the roof again to play lookout while I run inside?”

  Nico took a moment to admire the length of belly that was exposed when Zach scrambled up to stand on the roof of the truck, then walked away.

  The store had already been looted, so he didn’t have to break down the door. No doubt the drugs behind the counter were long gone, but Nico wasn’t after pharmaceuticals. Even if it would be nice to have some antibiotics on hand, just in case.

  Holding a flashlight between his shoulder and jaw, Nico snatched up a bag and began filling it with whatever he could find among the jumbled mess on the floor and shelves. The looters had been sloppy, as looters tended to be. He grabbed bandages and gauze, ointments, antihistamines—anything of use that had been left behind. Even the condoms had been scavenged, though, thank God, not completely. He was stuffing a couple of large boxes into his bag when he heard the thunderous report of the shotgun, followed by Zach’s bellow.

  The glass door shattered, along with the window, when Nico burst through it, his bag left behind on the littered floor of the pharmacy. A second shotgun blast nearly deafened him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Zach still atop the truck, apparently unscathed. One body lay in the road some thirty yards away, but another human form was pelting toward them with inhuman speed.

  Nico charged before it could get any closer. The matted hair and ragged, half-absent clothing, and the bestial snarl on the revenant’s face only registered as an afterthought. He just knew he had to intercept her. If the woman was moving that fast, she wasn’t anyone he wanted within breathing distance of Zach.

  He slammed into her, driving her backward before she could get closer than ten yards from the truck. She crashed onto the ground, her clawed hands already coming up to shred him as she screamed in animalistic rage. He couldn’t let her cut him any more than he could let her get close to Zach. Without thinking, he did what he’d seen his mother do the previous summer and drove his elbow down into her throat. There was a crunching, shattering sound—louder and more grotesque than he remembered—and then she died, convulsing beneath him, struggling for a breath she would never take.

  It took a long moment for the red haze to fade from his vision. Zach’s voice crept into Nico’s awareness, getting closer. He quickly thrust a hand up. “Stay back! I don’t know if she clawed me.”

  He couldn’t feel the burn of any scratches, but then, he couldn’t feel much of anything just now. His face and extremities were numb as the surge of fury and fear that had propelled him through the door and into the path of the oncoming revenant faded. He spun to face Zach, devouring him with his eyes, needing to assure himself that Zach was all right.

  He was pale and his aquamarine eyes were bulging, but he was unscathed, staring at Nico from a safe distance.

  “You’re not bleeding,” he said, speaking gently, as if trying to soothe an agitated animal. “Nico? You’re okay. You’re not bleeding.”

  That was all he needed to hear. With another rush of energy, he closed the distance between them and drove Zach against the truck, his open mouth hungry on Zach’s. His heart was still racing, his mouth still had an odd, metallic taste on the back of his tongue, and every impulse felt too big for his body to contain, like the need to act was going to erupt through his skin, shattering him like the peak of a volcano.

  Zach was trembling in his arms and his grasp on Nico felt weak, but it didn’t matter. Nico spun him so that Zach was facing the truck, his ass pressing into Nico’s unexpected erection. Nico gnawed and sucked at his neck, gripping him hard, spurred by the need to seize and bite and fuck and claim.

  Zach’s moan was a plaintive sound that barely registered as Nico’s searching hand found Zach hard beneath the fly of his trousers. He ripped the zipper down and thrust his fingers inside to grasp Zach, jerking him roughly as he ground hard against his ass. Zach came with a startled cry, and Nico humped against him, needing that release, needing to do something with the fire and passion and violence welling inside him. Needed—

  He tore himself away from Zach, hunched over with the pain of the stymied orgasm swelling his cock and clutching his balls. “Fuck. I can’t.”

  Panting, Zach was slumped against the car, but he managed to gasp, “Nico?”

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t remember why he couldn’t do it, because nothing was making sense right now, but he couldn’t do it. He had to stop.

  “Gimme a minute,” he muttered, cupping his aching groin. “I feel— Something’s not right. Just gimme a minute. I can’t think. Get back up on the roof. Stay there.”

  He staggered away before Zach could question him, striding down the length of strip mall that housed the pharmacy and rounding the corner of the building, putting plenty of distance between him and Zach. When he was sure Zach wouldn’t follow him, he opened his fly and jerked himself to completion against the wall of the building, then slumped beside the mess and tried to make sense of the chaos in his brain.

  It seemed to take forever for his scrambled thoughts to organize themselves, for his pulse and breathing to slow to the point where he felt sane and human again. Even after his orgasm, the urgent, violent need didn’t fade, at least not right away, and he had to stop himself from returning to Zach to finish what he’d started. What the fuck was wrong with him?

  He slowly walked back around the building to find Zach sitting on the roof of the truck as Nico had ordered him to. And what was that about, anyway? What made him think he had any right to just bark orders at Zach and walk away, especially after manhandling him the way he had?

  Zach didn’t look very alert. In fact, if something else had tried to attack, it would be on top of them before Zach even noticed. His face was drawn, his wet eyes unfocused and absolutely devastated.

  “Oh God,” Nico whispered, reaching up to help him down. “I’m sorry, Zach. I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  “What? No.” Zach blinked at him and then shoo
k his head, slipping off the roof into Nico’s arms. He made a strangled sound. “I killed someone. Oh, my God. I killed someone!”

  Zach fell apart, sobbing into Nico’s shoulder. Nico held him, murmuring soothing nonsense. “Shh. It’s okay. We both did. We had to. It’s gonna be all right.”

  Strange that it was only now occurring to him that he’d murdered someone as well. It hadn’t seemed important during those strange, fugue-like moments of rage and lust. He could barely remember now what he’d done, except that it had seemed absolutely necessary and absolutely right at the time.

  He hadn’t felt that way when Silvia had attacked him. But then, he’d been focused on getting the lightcar to land and then he’d been unconscious. If she’d still attempted to attack him once they were on the ground, would he have reacted the same way he just had? Was this part of the Alpha strain? Even during the bombing at the midsummer party, he didn’t remember feeling that same bestial need to destroy any and all threats when he fought.

  “Are you okay?” Zach finally asked, drawing back and wiping his face. He still looked pale and shocked, but his eyes were focused again. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I’m okay; I just—” Nico spread his hands with a helpless shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it will sink in later.”

  “Nico, was it . . . was it her?”

  Nico turned to look at the body he’d left lying on the ground. The hair was entirely the wrong color and length, the skin far too pale, the breasts too large.

  “No.” He wasn’t sure if he was feeling relief or regret that he hadn’t had a chance to correct his mistake, and he didn’t want to examine it. “If she’s still alive, she’s miles from here. Let’s get out of here. Just . . . get the stuff we need and go.”

  “What about them?” Zach jerked his chin toward the bodies. “Should we bury them? Burn them?”

  Nico pressed his lips together and shook his head. “No. I know it’s the right thing to do, and part of me wants to, but the longer we stay here, the longer something else has to come after us. You can’t go near them, and if I touch the one you shot, I’ll be covered in blood and that won’t be safe for you, either. I’m not risking you again.”

  Without giving Zach a chance to argue, he hurried into the pharmacy to grab the bag he’d dropped, then rushed out and stuffed it into his rucksack in the back. Zach was already in the driver’s seat with the engine running, and at Nico’s muttered command, he sped away as fast as he could safely manage.

  There was no possible way to completely bypass St. Louis. Eventually they would need to approach a more heavily populated area to cross the river. Nico really didn’t want to be stuck trying to find their way around the city in the dark, so they agreed to give up on finding a country road that wouldn’t get them hopelessly lost and would just try to get through the metro area as quickly as they could.

  Derelict suburbs with overgrown lawns—the crumbling remnants of a middle class that had ceased to exist long before the pandemic—quickly gave way to rising walls of apartment buildings lining either side of the freeway. The windows in those buildings were dark; some had been shot out or broken. He’d managed to mostly miss that element of this new world in the lightcar; it hadn’t seemed quite so empty and haunted from an aerial view.

  Despite the emptiness of the outskirts of the city, their progress was slow. Debris was scattered across the roads, though whether from riots or accidents, Nico wasn’t certain. He didn’t want to risk damage to the tires or the undercarriage of the truck by driving over something sharp, so he stayed as far from it as he could. Periodically there were abandoned cars they had to drive around, and on the other side of the freeway, they passed a number of leftover police and National Guard barricades apparently intended to keep people from leaving the city.

  Nico shook his head at the futility of it all. It was one thing to force an in-house quarantine on those in the suburbs and country, but to do it to the people packed into the urban areas had been tantamount to sentencing them all to death. Survival had favored the wealthy, and no doubt the white.

  The closer they came to the inner city, the more decrepit the buildings were. Factories and warehouses that had been defunct for years or decades added to the tableau of ruin. Occasionally, they would pass one of the urban renewal areas, where gentrification had driven out the indigent people in favor of renovations that only the very wealthy could afford.

  If anyone was still alive inside those overpriced condos now, it didn’t show.

  I helped make this happen.

  The thought ate at Nico, though he knew his role was tangential and insignificant at best. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been another escort hired by McClosky.

  Zach didn’t seem as amazed by the silence and stillness as Nico did, but then, he wouldn’t, would he? He had already passed through it before, when he and his father and brother had left Vermont to return to Indiana. He was solemn, and several times Nico thought he saw Zach’s lips moving in silent prayer. Was he praying for the souls of all those who were lost, or simply that he and Nico would make it through unscathed?

  Perhaps he was praying for forgiveness. For Nico, if not for himself.

  It took Nico a moment to realize what the large, uneven mass on the road in the distance was. Another roadblock. But not one of the official cordons the cops or military had put in place. Instead, it was a jumble of furniture, and even cars, forming a barricade across their side of the highway.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  Beside him, Zach asked, “Who do you think left that there?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.” He stopped the car a good fifty yards from the obstruction, not turning off the engine. No one appeared to be manning the roadblock, unless they were waiting for him to drive closer so they could come up behind and box him in. There were no nearby exits, no easy way to get off the freeway and choose another route. But perhaps whoever had constructed the thing was gone now, their efforts to prey on hapless passersby failing due to lack of hapless passersby.

  “Get back up on the truck.” Trying to see out every window at once for any signs of habitation, Nico reached blindly into the back for the assault rifle. “I’ll check it out and see if I can clear things out of the way if there’s no one around. Do not come down.”

  The edges of Zach’s tense lips were white as he, too, kept darting his gaze around in every direction. His reloaded shotgun had been propped between them, and he grabbed the handgun off the dash. “What if someone attacks you?”

  “If they do, take the truck and get the hell out of here.” Nico’s shoulders twitched as if he could feel predatory eyes upon him. Which he wasn’t sure he did, but he didn’t think he could be blamed for being a little paranoid. “We won’t know if they’re infected or not, so you stay away from them. If I can take care of them myself, great. If I can’t, though, I’ll probably be injured badly enough that you’ll need to keep clear of me too.”

  “I’m not going to abandon you!”

  “You don’t have a choice!” He glared at Zach. “I do not want you getting infected, so just get your fucking ass in the truck and get out of here if you need to.”

  To avoid giving Zach a chance to argue further, Nico flung himself out of the truck and slammed the door behind him. The empty highway and abandoned buildings were quiet all around him. Jesus, so quiet. It shouldn’t be like this. The silence could drive him mad.

  Nico held his gun at the ready and cautiously approached the barricade, incessantly scanning his surroundings for any hint of who might be lurking there. Damn it, they didn’t have time for this. It was already late afternoon, and he desperately needed to get Zach out of the city before nightfall.

  Finally, it came down to a choice between standing there waiting for something to attack or putting his gun down and trying to clear enough room for the car to get through. Or would they be better off turning around and trying to find another way to go? He took a deep breath. Either whoever had b
uilt this thing was incredibly patient or they were long gone themselves. His hands shook with adrenaline as he slung the assault rifle across his back and began testing the construction of the roadblock.

  The furniture was easy to move. The sofas and chairs were musty and rank; obviously they’d been sitting out for weeks or even months. He heaved them across the concrete median where they thumped onto the other side of the road, sometimes with a snap of cracking wood.

  The cars were another matter. Whoever had rolled them into place to form the foundation of the roadblock hadn’t left enough of their operating computers intact for Nico to gain access and drive them out of the way. Instead, he had to push them to the shoulder of the highway, struggling against their flat, locked tires the entire time.

  He was grunting and panting so loudly, his heart pounding in his ears, that he didn’t hear the first growl until he paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes. The low, animal sound was deafening in the unnerving silence, and a chorus of others joined it. Nico froze and straightened very slowly, his eyes quickly finding the pack of ragged, dirty dogs that were milling around the truck.

  Some were sniffing at the doors and tires, or looking up at Zach, who was out of their reach. Others had their attention on Nico. Even at this distance, he could see Zach was pale and terrified. The dogs were rail-thin, starving, and obviously feral. Cautiously, Nico began fumbling behind his back, trying to bring his weapon around. There were seven—no, wait, eight—dogs, and if they charged him en masse, there was no way he could gun them down before they were on him. Worse, he’d be firing in Zach’s direction, and he wasn’t great with a gun.

  Fuck. If they bit him, he was going to bleed, and if that happened, there was no way he could continue traveling with Zach.